Helen Gurley Brown is a publishing legend. Her non-fiction book, Sex And The Single Girl, is one of the literary cornerstones of the second wave of the feminist movement. For decades Helen Gurley Brown was the editor and the face of Cosmopolitan magazine.

Enter Helen: The Invention of Helen Gurley Brown and the Rise of the Modern Single Woman, By Brooke Hauser, is the story of how Helen Gurley Brown started off life as the daughter of poor as dirt family in Arkansas and ended her life as one of the most influential women of the 20th century. Together, with her husband, David Brown, they helped to pave the way for future generations of women to move beyond the traditional roles of marriage and motherhood.

While this book was slow at certain points, I very much appreciated not only the detail that Ms. Hauser put in the book, but also the unconventional structure of the narrative. While it seems that on the surface that Helen Gurley Brown was pushing the traditional agenda for women, she was actually subtlety changing the world.